Sunday, July 26, 2015

It's really very simple

[Credit to Dmitry Leikin, whose brief post at d3.ru served as the source and the inspiration for this piece.]

There are times when a loud cry of “The emperor has no clothes!” can be most copacetic. And so, let me point out something quite simple, yet very important.

The old world order, to which we became accustomed over the course of the 1990s and the 2000s, its crises and its problems detailed in numerous authoritative publications on both sides of the Atlantic—it is no more. It is not out sick and it is not on vacation. It is deceased. It has passed on, gone to meet its maker, bought the farm, kicked the bucket and joined the choir invisible. It is an ex-world order.
If we rewind back to the early 1980s, we can easily remember how the USSR was still running half of Europe and exerting major influence on a sizable chunk of the world. World socialist revolution was still sputtering along, with pro-Soviet regimes coming in to power here and there in different parts of the globe, the chorus of their leaders' official pronouncements sounding more or less in unison. The leaders made their pilgrimages to Moscow as if it were Mecca, and they sent their promising young people there to learn how to do things the Soviet way. Soviet technology continued to make impressive advances: in the mid-1980s the Soviets launched into orbit a miracle of technology—the space station Mir, while Vega space probes were being dispatched to study Venus.

But alongside all of this business-as-usual the rules and principles according which the “red” half of the globe operated were already in an advanced state of decay, and a completely different system was starting to emerge both at the center and along the periphery. Seven years later the USSR collapsed and the world order was transformed, but many people simply couldn't believe in the reality of this change. In the early 1990s many political scientists were self-assuredly claiming that what is happening is the realization of a clever Kremlin plan to modernize the Soviet system and that, after a quick rebranding, it will again start taking over the world. People like to talk about what they think they can understand, never mind whether it still exists.

And what do we see today? The realm that self-identifies itself as “The West” is still claiming to be leading economically, technologically, and to be dominant militarily, but it has suffered a moral defeat, and, strictly as a consequence of this moral defeat, a profound ideological defeat as well.

It's simple.

1. How can they talk of the inviolability of private property while confiscating the savings of depositors in Cypriot banks?

2. How can they talk of safeguarding the territorial integrity of countries while destroying, in turn, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine?

3. How can they talk of free enterprise and then sign contracts to build ships but refuse to deliver them because of pressure from Washington, as happened with Mistral ships which Russia ordered from France?

4. How can they talk of democracy and then use naked threats against the premier of Greece—the birthplace of European democracy—forcing him to ignore the unprofitable results of the Greek national referendum?

5. How can they talk about fighting racism while in the US they are constantly shooting mass quantities of unarmed Negros, all the while forbidding people to call them Negros.

6. How can they accuse the Serbs of genocide while refusing to acknowledge what they did to supposedly “independent” Kosovo, which has been turned into a European criminal enclave specializing in the production and distribution of narcotics?

7. How can they claim to oppose extremism and terrorism while training, arming and financing ISIS and the Ukrainian Neo-nazis?

8. How can they talk about justice while the US maintains the largest prison population in the history of the world and has executed many people subsequently discovered to have been innocent?

9. How can they talk about freedom of religion after the US federal government exterminated the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, and then imprisoned the survivors, even though the government's allegations against the sect have subsequently been proven to be false?

10. How can they accuse others of corruption after the colossal financial embarrassment of 2008, in the run-up to which obvious financial bubbles that were ready to bust were assigned the highest ratings?

What has happened is the worst thing that could have possibly happened: in full view of the entire world, “Western values” have been demonstrated to be null and void.

If you think that these are just some specific examples of difficulties or mistakes that could potentially be overcome in some dim and foggy future, then you are wrong: this is all of the “Western values” worth mentioning, and they have all been invalidated by observation. Note the past tense: they already have been invalidated. Are there any “Western values” left intact? Oh yes, just one: the rights of sexual minorities. But it is not possible to maintain Western civilization on the strength of gay marriage alone.

Is it any wonder then that the rest of the world is trying to put as much distance between itself and the morally bankrupt “West” as it possibly can, as quickly as it can? China is working on developing its own model, Russia is striving for self-sufficiency and independence from Western imports and finance, and even Latin America, once considered the backyard of the US, is increasingly going its own separate way.

The ranks of the fools who are still buying the West's story are shrinking, while the ranks of the rebels are growing. There is the truth-teller Edward Snowden, who was forced to flee to Moscow to avoid persecution back home. There are European parliamentarians who recently broke ranks and visited Crimea. There are French and German military men who are volunteering to defend Eastern Ukraine against Western attack. There are the many European businessmen who came to the Economics Forum in St. Petersburg to sign trade deals with Russia, never mind what their politicians think of that.

On the other side, the rapidly emerging new world order was recently on display in Ufa, capital of the majority-Moslem Republic of Bashkortostan in Southern Urals, Russian Federation. Leaders of more than half the world's population came there to sign deals, integrate their economies, and coordinate security arrangements. India and Pakistan set their differences aside and walked in through the door at the same time; Iran is next. “The West” was not represented there.

Now that all Western values (other than the rights of sexual minorities) have been shown to be cynical exercises in hypocrisy, there is no path back. You see, it is a matter of reputation, and a reputation is something that one can lose exactly once. There is a path forward, but it is very frightening. There is the loss of control: Western institutions can no longer control the situation throughout much of the world, including, in due course, on their own territory. There is the abandonment of the Western narrative: Western pontificators, pundits and “thought leaders” will find that their talking points have been snatched away and will be reduced to either babbling apologetically or lapsing into embarrassed silence. Finally, there is the loss of identity: it is not possible, for the non-delusional, to identify with something (“The West”) that no longer exists.

But the most frightening thing of all is this: behind a morally bankrupt civilization there are morally bankrupt people—lots and lots of them. Their own children, who will be forced to make their way in the world—however it turns out to be—will be as disrespectful of them as they were of their own vaunted civilizational values.

31 comments
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Something tells me that Garry Kasparov would vehemently object to the notion that "the West" is in a decrepit condition. He was on a panel recently with Victoria Nuland and together they were debating a team that included Stephen Cohen. Kasparov is clueless about the West, sticking to a narrative and an idealism that have long since ceased to exist.

I'm not sure what to call the Scandinavian countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark) and some of the wealthier European nations such as Switzerland. If they are part of "the West" then they represent the better part. They seem to have held onto at least some of the Western values that you listed.

Is it ok to post this article on facebook? I won't do so until you give the ok, or until you post it onto facebook yourself.

I have enjoyed many Club Orlov posts and have reposted the first few paragraphs, with a link to rest of the article at Club Orlov, on my sight, straightlinelogic.com. Club Orlov is also on my blog roll. That helps, not hurts Club Orlov; the site gets readers from my site that it might not otherwise get. I think out of justifiable anger at Zero Hedge, which somehow published an article before it went up on Club Orlov, that Club Orlov is cutting off its nose to spite its face. I request permission to continue publishing excerpts from Club Orlov articles (after publication on Club Orlov) with a link to Club Orlov. If permission is denied I will of course comply with Club Orlov’s wishes, but like I said, you’re cutting off your nose to spite your face. I have encouraged everybody and anybody to republish Straight Line Logic articles with proper attribution and a link and it has only been to my benefit. The occasional illicit post is the inevitable price we bloggers pay for putting our stuff on the Internet.

So in terms of the West's party being more-or-less over, I was pleasantly surprised (albeit a bit nonplussed after all these years) to see TheTopicThatCannotBeNamed (i.e. most of what we talk about here), mentioned prominently in Ron Paul's current ad campaign. Not just mentioned but actually -- am I hearing this right? -- honestly talked-about and faced head-on. Or at least certain aspects of it. Attempts within the mainstream to actually pull heads from asses are pretty rare. I'm not in love with Ron Paul or anything, and I certainly don't think the course of history will be altered much, but I have to applaud the toddler-steps.

You did it again... and beautifully illustrated with a dead but beautifully blue bird with yellow. Well done - Thank you - very much indeed... no worries Zero Hedge is a good one. I shall send the link to my best friends and some of my party mates - we are trying to get Denmark not to take part in USA's wars !!! Try to get it out of NATO and out of EU... keep our Danish soul intact - someone told me countries don't have souls... well they do if they have not lost it like USA and Japan... To be serious and I am (serious) off and on... yesterday was ON... when I looked at the fact we have made 15 million refugees = made by the West.. and they all want to get to EU .....Here is the reality EU and USA combined has a population of 800 million so the 15 million refugees we created should be taken in and taken care of... its is 2% of the total population and so that is 6 million for the USA and 9 million for EU... Denmark with its 5.5 million people takes 110.000 - Germany with 80 million takes 1.6 million and so on and so forth... we can draw up a 10 step program how to do that... while peace negotiations are STARTED right away. If the peace negotiation end with peace - the 15 million refugees got to return to their countries, if no peace deals they stay in EU and USA as long as it takes to make peace... ANDI am sure under such circumstances peace deals will be made - the refugees can return and AND !!!! USA and EU grant these countries money to rebuild their smashed houses, roads etc... and their economy.- BASTA !!!-ml Bente...

Its not so easy to kill a culture Dmitri. The imposition of Bolshevism and its fall are a blip on the cultural history of Russia. The Orthodox church culture proved far more lasting.In the West the echoes of Roman cultural imperialism are still with us and will long outlast industrial financial capitalism. What you describe is the erosion of an imperial system with a bankrupt materialist ethos. Fortunately that is a superstructure that can be lost without sinking the ship.

I was in Berlin in December of 89 when the Wall came down. I will admit that I didn't anticipate any of this. I did know that no one was more worried than the joint chiefs at the Pentagon. It started to become clear just after the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq that the US had come to a fork in the road. No longer facing a single super power adversary the US had to make a choice between a multi-lateral world by creating a new balance of power shared among dominant world states that would take considerable give and take diplomacy, or a unilateral world with the US at the top managing the world's military, finance and trade. The "Our way or the highway" doctrine of GWB.

The more difficult way would be the multilateral world. There is no doubt that would force many unfavorable concessions and a vote that would carry considerable influence but not absolute power.

The "Our way or the highway" doctrine seems preferable but it is fraught with many more potentially lethal pitfalls. It meant the that the US is the final word. The "War on Terror" becomes, in fact, "The War on Opposition"...any opposition.

This policy was born out of the PNAC (Project for the New American Century) or the Neo-cons. It is an aggressive faction populated with principal personalities from GWB's administration. Far-right conservatives preaching a global manifest destiny for the US and the window of opportunity is, NOW! My guess is that Hitler's quote regarding Russia is ringing in their ears without considering past consequences.

"We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down."

I believe that they are dead serious about this. One front runner in the Republican party for 2016 is Jeb Bush one of signers of the PNAC. However it doesn't matter because all serious candidates are unashamedly, pro-war.

What is interesting is the a number of prominent Neo-cons that have found their way into high places in a Democratic administration. Victoria Nuland is an excellent example as assistant secretary of state that has placed herself into covert hotspots like Ukraine, Georgia and Kazakhstan.

The current method of warfare is to get out the checkbook and fund covert forces. As they have in "The Islamic State" and the Ukraine. The very thing that the USGov says we should be wary of is their primary tool, "The Internet" This allows free flow of information no matter where for the purpose of recruitment.

Conversely, just this last week we have seen Wesley Clark, unofficially representing the military warning Americans against disloyalty with the actual threat of internment. And when you consider laws already in place such as the NDAA. This is designed for the purpose of provoking fear of arrest, without trial resulting in indefinite internment.

Actually, I'd like to share this item with my friends and followers in FB and Tweet, as I usually do with other items I appreciate adding up an alternative reading. It helps to improve our comprehensive view of the world. But now I'm confused because of your ban. Does it help to spread your views?

An outstanding article, thank you. I know you only touched the tip. There is so much more going on here. They are killing so many here that it is beyond reason. They have turned this country into a piece of shit banana republic. There is no fixing it. The idiots know what they have done and are ready to leave or go underground into their facilities when the shit finally implodes, and it will. They have not disarmed the population and when everyone wakes up one morning and finds that all their money has been confiscated, well, they are coming for them. It won't be pitchforks this time. I don't believe the military or law enforcement will last very long when they realize their bosses have deserted them. They will head home to their own families if they can get there. This is going to get real ugly real fast. Sadly I look at my childrens generation and am totally disgusted with what has been done to them. They will not survive. They have no survival skills and it's to late. Most people my age are clueless. If I could leave I would, but go where? The US has turned most of the world into shit holes. Desperate people the same as here. I want to survive and I want to make them pay, Forever. The majority of American's won't be able to blame anyone but themselves. Thank you for your articles that you write with such honesty. Keep it up please. I send these to only a few who actually read them and understand.

Dmitry your every post is genius.... Regarding your last post, there is so much brainwashing here in the US. I'd swear The Gulag Archipelago is almost as common a book here as the bible and we have tons of bibles. I've read it, everyone has, but a much more scathing account could be written about the us's own Gulag, which is ongoing, and which imprisons far more people than Stalin did at his worst. And the users zeks were put to work on public projects not used as slave labor for profit at in the US.

There's a book called Red Plenty, you'll just have to Google around, even the web page for it is great reading. I recommend you check it out!

Once enough people are disenfranchised from the myth of eternal growth of consumerism, they will put their collective foot down, saying "enough already"! What particular sand is thrown in which vital gears is unimportant. It just has to be determined and concerted enough to remind the masses that our leaders are supposed to have the majority's interest at heart, and that they depend on us remaining entranced believers, battered into psychic submissive greed by the great carrot in the sky fantasy, backed up with the whip of fear for survival. It is a thoroughly screwed up system, present-day predatory capitalism, except for the gilded few, and will go the way of all empires before it, Willy nilly. Patience will come back as chief virtue as we learn to go cold turkey from our distractions, maybe even Dmitry's visionary blogposts. I am learning to internalize his wisdom therefore while we still have the chance, as his understanding is so valuable for us today as a see the world's greatest military outfoxed by medieval mountain men, humiliating itself in Abu Ghraib, and reduced to driving recruitment through lies and ersatz patriotism.

Don't leave out the West's slave UN's role in all this mess. It has to be democratized based on population it represents with no vets or to die off.Additionally, a new moral code has to be agreed on the basis of mutual existence.

The game that has been played since ancient times is that of a power hungry elite dominating & becoming parasites upon the docile majority, who are interested in their families & an easy life. Religious & political organisations can be described thus, as can educational & business organisations now. All the same "leaders" (parasites) are still in control in the ex-soviet states.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Now the game is world domination & depopulation:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MQlIpJ2lmMIf link does not work, put in search box: Agenda 21 The Depopulation Agenda For A New World Order

I recommend a book revealing international financiers as the powers behind the scenes, again going back to ancient times: Pawns in the Game, by William Guy Carr.Carr was a WWII Canadian naval intelligence officer who spent 40 years researching why the world was not thriving, despite huge technological progress.

Starting to seem that the time-lag for 'the West' following the USSR into collapse and oblivion will be about thirty years, rather than the often-estimated twenty-five: 1989-2019. The signs - for those prepared to be awake to them - are getting rather obvious; here in the ever-compliant imperial province of ukstate, as much as in the rotten-ripe metropolitan state of the US's tottering empire.

Dmitry, on another matter: Am I missing something, or has there been a sudden increase of snooping and tailored advertising at readers on Club Orlov? The warning about biscuits (British-English for 'cookies') appears to be new; as does the scatter of advertising aimed - on my computer - at what the Google snoopers estimate to be my particular interests.

Is this bowing to the inevitable, and funding the Club Orlov blog by advertising? If so, sad business. But still, we can always do what I do with other webspaces that host advertising: deliberately, bloody-mindedly avoid the products and sites which we're being nagged to buy or visit, just to thwart the commercialising bastards. As Bill Hicks famously exhorted advertising and PR people: "Kill yourselves!" It would be a lot more civilised not to have any contact at all with such toxic trash, though. Have you personally any control over this contamination of your website?

Rolnard Covzure, Ron Paul is the only politician who is for the people and against the tyranny of the US government. He tells the truth! He is a voice of reason and sanity in a country with a grossly corrupt, self-serving, evil government. Unfortunately, too many US citizens aren't smart enough to elect someone like Ron Paul. Too many US citizens are brainwashed by continuous government propaganda.

I am in NO way directly affiliated with Mr. D. Orlov and I am sending this message on my own initiative for the better of all concerned.

Just a friendly reminder about the spelling of the first name of Mr. Orlov. In Russian his first name is spelled...

Дми́трий

... and that spelling in Russian is rendered in English as...

Dmitry

***Please remember there's no "i" at the end of his first name, just a "y".***

Perhaps look at his first name this way as a "play on letters and words" in English--

There is no "I" at the end of his name, and NOT even a lower case "i", unlike the blatant egoism demonstrated by most bloggers who scream, "I, I, I!" with their pretentious pronouncements. While proud, this man is humble and I know that from direct experience interacting with him personally via email.

He does this blog because he cares about what's going on and wants to help not only us but future generations as well.

Instead--

There is only the letter of lower case "y" at the end of his first name, which I take as representing the word, "why?", and this is because he questions everything and that's even more reason to render his name this way.

Let's remember that, paradoxically, questions are “the answer” and will lead us to discover more answers, and thus, more questions, which, hopefully, will continue the cycle of questions and answers that we hope will lead us to the state of being we call “wisdom”.

My apologies if this seems a bit "nit picky" to some of you and I ask you to consider how you feel when someone misspells YOUR beloved first name!

I like the commentary that John Anthony West uses, having discovered at an early age that the West is an insane asylum where the criminally insane run the asylum. He refers to what he calls "The four cowboys of the apocalypse" which are (named in order) Capitalism, Democracy, Patriotism and Technology. To Western defenders these institutions are equivalent to the four pillars of Heaven but as JA West describes them it is clear that on examination they are each in practice the exact opposite of what they pretend to be in theory. Capitalism is not about 'Free enterprise' or 'Free Markets' but its opposite. Democracy is not by the people, of the people for the people, but rather a pretext for clandestine control by the ensconced aristocracy, and in effect doesn't exist. Patriotism is not a genuine love of one's country for the good that it does but rather a means of extracting conformity, playing on and inflaming passions that reside below the waterline of rationality, and Technology, far from liberating anyone is only used as a means to devalue or eliminate employment and dumb down people while they are being spied on, tracked and catalogued. I like the way you de-mask the pretense Dimitri but I wonder, just because little Red Riding Hood finally realizes she's not dealing with her beloved Granny, does that mean the wolf is dead. I would worry that it's more alive and dangerous than ever, ready to do with claw and fang what it can no longer hope to achieve in disguise. Maybe that's why JA West chose the false pillars of the west as the harbingers of apocalypse.

Dmitry-America is the best country in the world. For Americans. Who else would want us? Personally I like Switzerland and speak a little German but I heard Sylvester Stallone tried to buy his way in for several million and they didn't want him. I don't think they'd want me either. Zimbabwe could probably use me--I am after all a dentist--but I just saw on yahoo that a dentist from MN just paid $50,000 to kill a lion with a bow and arrow. Terrific. They'd probably kill me for free. I realize you have given up on the whole improvability thing at least with respect to American self governance but those of us with nowhere else to go have to figure out how to make this a better place. And we appreciate your sardonic input but it doesn't sound as if you really want to be an American. I don't know whether you are or not--none of my business really-and I totally agree the NWO is already here. The fact that Cheney, Corzine, and Jamie Dimon are not in the slammer is as good an indication that Jimmy Stewart is not secretely running things as any. I voted for Ron Paul in 2012 but voting is for feeling magnaninmous not changing things. My oldest son is working in an orphanage in Acapulco helping poor people, my daughter is in SteamboatSprings helping rich people. My youngest son is going to college because his mom and I went to college. Perhaps he'll meet a girl who is into sailing or organic gardening. As for the Big Club that Carlin says I'm not in, I still feel protective of its tattered reputation but I'm not blind-thanks to your ilk.

Thanks for another good blog Dmitry. I believe we should be joining the dots between the relentless stalking of Russia and the advanced nature of our ecological unraveling.The poles are now melting in a death spiral and the millions of acres that are burning are depositing soot on the ice in a positive feedback loop of consequences. Check out the exponential function. This situation will unravel faster than anyone except Professor Guy McPherson is saying.Guy's blog is Nature Bats Last at guymcpherson.com and he has a radio show of the same name at prn.fm

@Are there any “Western values” left intact? Oh yes, just one: the rights of sexual minorities.

And even that "value" is fizzling out.

"Kenya’s President Did NOT Like What Obama Said To His Country And He Let The Whole World Know It":

"Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta has made it clear that President Obama was speaking to the wrong congregation when he urged Kenyans to embrace gay rights.During a Saturday news conference in Nairobi, Kenya, at the start of his trip to Africa, Obama equated the denial of gay rights with racism. “As an African-American, I am painfully aware of what happens when people are treated differently under the law,” Obama said.Kenyatta replied that although there are many areas of agreement between Kenya and the United States, Obama found an area where the two nations disagree.“There are some things that we must admit we don’t share, our culture, our societies don’t accept,” Kenyatta said. “For Kenyans today, the issue of gay rights is really a non-issue. We want to focus on other issues that really are day-to-day issues for our people.”Obama’s call for gay rights came despite pre-visit requests from Kenyan politicians and religious leaders to leave the issue alone.“We do not want him to come and talk on homosexuality in Kenya or push us to accepting that which is against our faith and culture,” said Mark Kariuki, the key architect of the letter. Kariuki leads an alliance representing 38,000 churches and 10 million Kenyan Christians.“The family is the strength of a nation. If the family is destroyed, then the nation is destroyed,” Kariuki said. “So we don’t want to open doors for our nation to be destroyed!”Kenyatta’s opposition to Obama reflects Kenyan society. A 2007 Pew Global study found that 96% of Kenyans surveyed believe that homosexuality should be rejected. Forty-one percent of American respondents felt that way at the time of the poll.Kenyan law makes sexual activity between two individuals of the same gender illegal and punishable by a maximum jail sentence of 14 years in most cases."@http://www.westernjournalism.com/kenyas-president-did-not-like-what-obama-said-to-his-country-and-he-let-the-whole-world-know-it/

And not only:

“Even if people don’t like us for it, our Church has always said homosexuality is unnatural and marriage is between a man and a woman,” Cardinal John Onaiyekan of Abuja told the News Agency of Nigeria July 26...He stressed that “there is no question of the Catholic Church changing its positions on this matter". @http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/african-leaders-counter-obamas-ideological-colonization-in-kenya-61676/

Besides a financial deficit, an infrastructure deficit, a democracy deficit, an environmental deficit, deindustrialization, and a news deficit, these days the U.S. also has a moral deficit. This country lives off its past achievements.

Actually, in some ways what is happening now may be similar to what Stalin did to communism. In the 1930's, after the Great Depression, there was a fairly broad communist movement. The brutality of Stalin's government, though, ended up alienating many supporters of communism.

Western moral bankruptcy is rampant and self-evident in the cannon fodder countries under USA/Germany yoke. Not only at Greece: spanish, portuguese and italian people are getting nihilistic about western values ("American values" and "european values" I mean).Unafortunately, these opinions don't appear in TV (social engineering machines), but I've talk with sheperds, teachers and house wives and I've hear the same profanities and complaints against "liberal" (in European sense) Brussels and "progressive" Obama politics.

There are two well known men in America who are dedicated to telling the truth. Ron Paul and Paul Craig Roberts. Both warn of a coming collapse, a day of reckoning, but they do not realize how deep the rabbit hole goes because they haven't factored in the role that energy, or rather the lack thereof, will affect the US which is the most oil dependent country on the planet. When the dollar finally gets dumped (officially) as the world's reserve currency and oil exporting countries stop taking US dollars for their exports, the US will rather quickly and suddenly be deprived of the 2/3 of the energy it needs to import, mostly from countries that hate or government for many decades of military bullying.

The world is catching on to the vile, dirty tricks the neocons have been using to maintain US hegemony. Russia is the first country to stand up to these bastards, and that is why they staged that bloody coup, installed their puppet oligarch, shot down that Malaysian plane with 298 innocent souls on board, and have their neo Nazis and mercenaries shelling civilians in the "separatist" republics. Ron Paul suggests the insanity of trying to provoke Russia leads him to believe the collapse is close at hand, and Paul Craig Roberts has quite a few insights into this whole situation. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2015/08/03/washingtons-fifth-columns-inside-russia-china-paul-craig-roberts/ His take on the murder of the 298 people on the passenger jet the neocons shot down with their fighter jets just in time to get potentially reluctant European dupes to jump on the demonize/sanction Russia bandwagon http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2015/07/30/shot-mh-17-paul-craig-roberts/ and his take on the puppet regime in Kiev (who I last read the people were starting to turn against). http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2015/06/04/ukrainians-dispossessed-americans-next-paul-craig-roberts/

Just as Dmitry said, the retirement system is doomed to fail, they are trying to steal people's retirement savings, and they have their eyes on people's pensions. And people are getting all worked up about Donald Trump vs Hillary Clinton, likeas though there is any political solution to the impending collapse. Mass shootings, senseless violence and killing, the social and cultural stages of collapse appear to be gaining momentum and will not be averted in the US. Too many people are in denial.

Finally, a time line. Like Ron Paul and Paul Craig Roberts, does not delve into peak oil and the impending energy disaster. Stock market crash and world wide panic before the end of the year. Say goodbye to the petrodollar, followed by happy motoring, cruising for titties and beer, commuting to your job, etc all that good stuff we took for granted and hyperinflation, empty shelves. The beginning of "the long emergency" is close at hand. http://kingworldnews.com/gerald-celente-just-predicted-a-global-stock-market-crash-and-gave-the-exact-time-frame/

I have to take issue - it was not Western values that have proven to be invalid but the Western leaders. They have abandoned traditional Western values and replaced them with garbage. And many of the people of the US do not support what has been done. We are coming to a point where the people will demand an accounting from the entrenched elite and it will not be pretty...